Crosspoint switch matrices are useful for providing plural ports for interconnection of various components. Specifically, the crosspoint switch connects one of many input lines to one or more output lines. Initially crosspoint integrated circuits switches were developed to replace electromechanical switches such as relays in electrical telephone-switching systems. Crosspoint switches are now used in parallel processing, industrial-control-routing and data communication systems. Cross point switches are known which use decoding elements and/or multiplexers to form the desired connections. The complexity of these devices extensively increases as the number of input ports and output ports is increased. The crosspoint switches are typically limited to a relatively small number of input terminals and output terminals. The total number of input and output terminals (ports) of prior art crosspoint switches typically ranges from 8 to 128.
Switches have been used such as crosspoint switches for Ethernet applications wherein units are connected to the switch and the units have ports for various end users or for connections to other switches. As frames are received by the switch, some of the frames must be sent to an application processor. The application processor may have an application processor receive buffer of a given size and with a defined bandwidth allocated to the application processor port. This results in the situation that the buffer can fill and cause blocking of the entire switch. It is certainly possible to increase the size of the application processor receive buffer. This necessarily adds significant cost to the product. Another possible solution is to increase the bandwidth allocated to the application processor port. This has the drawback of unfavorably impacting the wire speed performance of the switch and/or adding costs to the products.